Elections and Other Hyderabadi Hungama

Hyderabad has been calm and free of news for a few days now due to critical By-Elections in Bobbili and Karimnagar. Karimnagar is critical to both Congress and TRS since TRS leader termed it as a referendum on Telangana.

Interesting concepts have emerged since I have experienced elections many years ago. Cricket Kits for Youth, Money and Liquor for the poor seem to be making their way from all parties to the constituencies. Think about it, if each candidate / party is spending atleast 25 crores to win an election, how will corruption come to an end in this Great Democracy. One interesting issue in karimnagar, where there is a large Bidi making workforce seem to be the removal of the Large Skull that now adorns every bidi pack. No one seems to pay much attention to other things, at least from the news I watched, its mostly about Bidi's.

Intelligence wings seem to be a new concept in elections now a days. Each party giving out camera cell phones or handycams to their party workers to capture their opponents buying othe votes through distribution of kits and money. The idea is to capture this info about the opponents and give the video to the election commission.. I dont get it, if the party is spending so much on buying votes, cant it spend a little extra to buy the EC ?

India's GDP grew at 9.2% in the 2nd Qtr [ Jul - Sep ]. Manufacturing grew 11.9%, Construction and financing at 9.8% etc. Agriculture again showed a dismal 1.7% in growth creating concerns across India on the long term issues around Food Security for India. With the explosion in Real Estate around Hyderabad, many small time and medium sized farms have given up the production of fruits/vegetables etc. This is a repeating occurrence across the landscape near every developing city and towns.

Reliance Fresh, a retail concept of Reliance that only sells vegetables, fruits and other related items opened its doors a month ago as a pilot in Hyderabad. These stores have been a great hit and have been attracting crowds. Prices are reasonable since they eliminated the middle men who were making the buck.

Metro [ A sams club like concept ] Opened its doors in Hyderabad. I didnt get to visit this place but from what I have seen in newschannels, it looks as big as SAMS and is by membership only for small, medium and large businesses. Its kinda like a combination of SAMS, OfficeDepot etc., serving all the needs of the small and medium businesses.

Reliance and Metro are already causing an imbalance in the economy that was owned by the mom and pop shops. On the employment front, its raining jobs and people are having no trouble finding low skilled jobs in Hyderabad.

15 mins are up.. more later

Some Useful Information about developments around Hyd

Hyderabad Outer Ring Road : http://www.hyderabadringroad.com/

Must See is the ORR video

Hyderabad International Airport : http://www.newhyderabadairport.com/

Dont miss the tour of HIA

Real Estate Information about new and upcoming Projects :
Let me clarify that I am not promoting this site in anyway. This site provides free information after registration and you have to be a paid member to take advantage of their offers. I have been reading this site for a few months now and the updates that pramod sends out are well researched and informative.

PRAMOD KIRON's EXCL Ventures : http://www.exclventures.com/

Vastu Fever in Hyderabad

Vastu, the fengshui like concept of India, which was intended to be an architectural science is driving all hyderabadi's including builders crazy.. Hyderabadi's are now so hooked into this concept that they cannot do anything without thinking about it. Let it be the direction / location of your home/bedroom/kitchen etc., or when it comes to picking a location for business or some folks are even applying it to their office spaces..

In the name of health and prosperity, folks are modifying many aspects of homes and some folks have even gone the extra mile to tear it all up and rebuild in the same space.

Recently while flipping through channels, found an interesting debate about this concept of vasthu. Participants were Builders, vasthu experts and the NGO jana vignana vedika [ peoples knowledge forum ] were fighting over whether this works or not. I did not hear anyone put forward any convincing arguments and the discussion went in many directions with no conclusive answer [ as expected ]

Builders : They were worried that vasthu was not standardized. They gave instances of where they had to make major modifications to projects just because some one announced that their project had a defect ( dosham ). One builder said.. "We dont care if vasthu works or not, we just want a standard". Another builder complained that he is unable to build enough east facing houses and it would just be impossible to make all houses face east.

Vasthu Experts claim that it works. For every question they had a story about how some one lost money or health or dear ones because of bad vasthu. Thats serious stuff, I think the host himself was so scared that he didnt ask them too many questions. They challenged the NGO folks to live in a house that was against vasthu for 3 years for a cash prize.

JVV : Jana vignan vedika claims that vasthu has nothing to do with science and its just an interior decoration philosophy like feng-shui. They have even thrown a challenge for some one to prove vasthu along with a cash prize.

Some fun facts I gathered from this program w.. India's vasthu is completely reverse of what it should be [ and silly me, I moved to India ;-) ] .. Building on hills is not allowed per vasthu, but still folks living on these hills [ banjara and jubilee ] are making money..

All said and done, I dont know if this works or not, but as a smart investor its important to get something that meets the basic principles, otherwise it may be a challenge to resell it.

Oh btw, my office is finally ready and I moved in last week... So far I did not even think about which way it was facing.. should I ?... what do you think ?...

Comment Spam

I am planning on restricting comments feature to registered users of blogspot .. Recently we have been targeted by spammers who keep posting information about mortgages and old city politics. Let me know what you think..

Hyderabadi Khabar

End Of Year activities including contract renewals are keeping me busy at work. Apologies for a late post..

N'uf about me, let me blabber about a few of my observations.. Most of the observations are critical of something or the other.. believe me, it makes living in Hyderabad a lot more fun.. whats life without some <>

• Comedy show .. Was at a party recently where Ash Chandler was performing.. His performance was ok but.. the jokes seem to be a straight out of the Comedy Central shows that I was glued to during my days in the US. Not sure what he was trying to do, but first he tried to be Seinfeld, then he tried to be a mimicry artist [ trying to impersonate Clinton and Bush ;( ], and in between he tried a few Sinatra and James Brown tunes. Overall I thought he was a better Sinatra impersonator than a comedian.
• Event management... seems to be the in-thing now. Every birthday party, engagement and misc event is being organized by EM's. They are very professional, young and hip crowd, as we have seen in movies before. The bigger challenge is that they keep walking around the event with headsets and bluetooth devices as if they are some sort of secret service entourage for the president of the US. I attended a recent event at HyderMahal in Grand Kakatiya and the EM's were going beyond what would be considered acceptable behaviour in the party. On the same note.. tollywood actors are now entering this business with the recent one being Raja.
• Democrats and Republicans should outsource their strategy to Hyderabad. Politics here are at their best[ pun intended ]. TDP tries to find fault with everything that the cong govt does and then the cong govt some how finds a document or news clipping with naidu claiming credit for the same in the past... What do you do when your opponent tries to nail you .. just add their assets into the same investigation.. TDP recently got the high court to investigate land fraud around ORR [ Cong's project ], .. Next day Cong govt included the land around Airport [ TDP project ] to the same dispute. Do you think TDP or Cong will pursue this any further ?
• Real Estate is sizzling and the values continue to soar. I have recently seen residential areas in jubilee hills sell for 80k a yard and some for as low as 38k per yard [ Not sure why such a huge difference.. may be one of them is an NRI and the other a localite or it could be the vaastu factor ].
• Commercial properties are hot now a days.. recently saw an ad for a commercial space in madhapur, nothing great but a 1500 sqft floor in the 2nd floor of a building. It was sold in 2 hours for 90 Laks.. Buyers were rushing in to give an advance to a shocked owner and... Guess what, the same owner listed the 3rd floor of the same sqft for a whopping 1.1 Cr and that sold within a day. I still cannot understand why the 3rd floor would sell for a premium..
  
• Malaysian township, a joint venture of APHB and IJM of malaysia booked at around Rs 1000/sqft almost 2 years ago was being hyped a lot. So a friend and I decided to take a look inside and this turned out to be the "Height of Optimism" of Hyderabadi's. This is just a glorified KPHB built as high rises, the quality, finish and layouts of the apartments and duplexes were so bad that we didnt have to bother much about anything else. This one is now going for anywhere between 2500 to 3000 and I would recommend you buy somewhere else instead of this one. You can get a decent construction quality at Gacchibowli for the same amount.
  
• Kitty parties .. This was my first run-in with this concept... Some how I was always under this impression that its some sort of a ladies party with an "adult" angle. [ sorry ladies, I really thought that it was.. based on the word kitty ;-) ]. Now its clear, Have to thank my buddy who explained what it ... Kitty only refers to a pooling of contributions and nothing else. Now that I know its like any other do's you would attend in Hyderabad, I look forward to attending some more of these.
  
• Stock Market.. I have heard it all .. Buy Low Sell High ? .. Look at the long term ? . Well I got bit once during the dot com bust.. so let me end it there .. ;-)

BTW, I am itching to write about the VAASTU [ feng-shui like concept] fever/craze in this city.. people are going nuts about it, but its getting late.. and my 15 minutes are up.. see you next week